At long last Spansion realizes that being a pure-play memory provider is not a long-term growth prospect. Next step for the company is to discontinue Fujitsu architecture and take a Cortex-M license from ARM.
There is a negative to this move - it will put Spansion in competition with its MCU ecosystem partners. I'm also not sure the present management team is up to the challenge of this new market - none of them have experience in the MCU business.

At long last Spansion realizes that being a pure-play memory provider is not a long-term growth prospect. Next step for the company is to discontinue Fujitsu architecture and take a Cortex-M license from ARM.
There is a negative to this move - it will put Spansion in competition with its MCU ecosystem partners. I'm also not sure the present management team is up to the challenge of this new market - none of them have experience in the MCU business.

My experience with Spansion is quite different than the last post (maybe from competition?). Without breaking company NDAs, I can say Spansion's 65nm products are there best yet. They've done a lot at the chip level to provide a very robust solution. We use both parallel and serial devices from Spansion and appreciate their performance levels. In terms of read, write and erase nobody can compete. Their NOR products are industry leading.
NOR is not a huge growth area so I find this acquisition intriguing. Fujitsu is not a big player and their portfolio is a bit behind others in auto like Freescale and Renesas. It'll be interesting to see where they take the products. More memory embedded with MCUs is definitely needed. In terms of acquisitions this should be an easy one for the two companies given their close history over the past couple decades.

My experience with Spansion is quite different than the last post (maybe from competition?). Without breaking company NDAs, I can say Spansion's 65nm products are there best yet. They've done a lot at the chip level to provide a very robust solution. We use both parallel and serial devices from Spansion and appreciate their performance levels. In terms of read, write and erase nobody can compete. Their NOR products are industry leading.
NOR is not a huge growth area so I find this acquisition intriguing. Fujitsu is not a big player and their portfolio is a bit behind others in auto like Freescale and Renesas. It'll be interesting to see where they take the products. More memory embedded with MCUs is definitely needed. In terms of acquisitions this should be an easy one for the two companies given their close history over the past couple decades.

From my point of view, Spansion has lost a lot of ground in NOR Flash for the industrial segment of the embedded market. From testing that I've done, their 65nm parts are inferior to their competition. I tested compatibility to previous 95nm parts and also endurance. Spansion came out on the bottom in both cases. Also, the sudden announcement that the 5V Flash was to be discontinued (because they didn't own the fab) did not engender continued confidence in Spansion as a supplier since they had been projecting that the 5V parts would continue to be available for years.
I work for a company where we are still selling products designed 10 years ago and it seems that I spend most of my time finding replacements for obsolete parts. What we are looking for is suppliers with a commitment to supporting their parts for a 10 year life. Spansion no longer appears to have that commitment.

From my point of view, Spansion has lost a lot of ground in NOR Flash for the industrial segment of the embedded market. From testing that I've done, their 65nm parts are inferior to their competition. I tested compatibility to previous 95nm parts and also endurance. Spansion came out on the bottom in both cases. Also, the sudden announcement that the 5V Flash was to be discontinued (because they didn't own the fab) did not engender continued confidence in Spansion as a supplier since they had been projecting that the 5V parts would continue to be available for years.
I work for a company where we are still selling products designed 10 years ago and it seems that I spend most of my time finding replacements for obsolete parts. What we are looking for is suppliers with a commitment to supporting their parts for a 10 year life. Spansion no longer appears to have that commitment.

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